


Flying Together

by kerlin



Category: Mighty Ducks (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:21:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fulton Reed's life, and how the pieces fit together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flying Together

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justlikethehamptons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justlikethehamptons/gifts).



> Appreciative thanks to M., who enthusiastically did source review with me, and talked to me all about many helpful things that did not make it into the fic but did help ground it, like the North Stars' uniform changes, the rules relative to the Flying V, and the historic role of the enforcer in the NHL.

He’d always been a creature of few words. His parents despaired of Fulton, as a small child, but when he finally chose to speak he did so clearly and carefully. 

He was always large for his age, his imposing size and his grave silence fitting well together through elementary school, through years of sitting in the back of class. Never exceptional, never standing out, but always with a peculiar self-possession that reassured some teachers and frightened others.

Words were not his medium, and so he sought other ways to explain his world. He came to depend on a sense of clean rightness in the things that guided him: an unspoken taste on the tongue. He balanced his life on that razor-fine edge, and learned to seek it and trust it.

Football never felt right for him, not even as his father’s son, as his uncle’s nephew, not even with what his grandfather had only half-jokingly called pigskin in his veins. Football players in a hockey town, they’d banded together and he’d been bent under pads and running two-a-days as soon as he could catch a ball.

But it had never felt right, never once: it was a sport of mud and of crushed grass, of the grind of bodies, of long crouched waiting, and though he was good at it - outstanding, even - he had fought an off-kilter sickness in every moment. 

Slapshots were clean. Slapshots were quick, and decisive, and he felt his muscles sing in harmony as he loosed them, absorbed the shock of stick connecting with puck, flowed into follow-through. He always knew when he’d aimed true the moment he loosed the puck; he could feel the disc’s trajectory through the air as a foregone conclusion. His control may have been lacking but his sense of rightness was infallible.

But he’d never played; never laced up skates, never done more than knock about with a stick and puck in back alleys. The more his father drilled football, the more he slapped pucks into garbage cans, old trunks, dumpsters - whatever gave him the fierce thrill of energy and adrenaline as he sent the puck through the air.

Fighting could be like that, too. He’d contended with his oversized body for so long, brutalized it on the playing field and folded it into too-small chairs and under knee-knocking desks, that he’d almost forgotten what it was like to feel it uncoil gracefully. The first day he bloodied a bully’s nose on the sidewalk outside his elementary school was the first time he really understood his own power, and the way he could control his world. Fighting had the added bonus of being an approved pastime in the Reed household, though it was far from the controlled brutality of football.

And so he’d teetered through his life until the day Gordon Bombay showed him how to combine those things together, and to give him flight. 

Skating was everything running and tackling was not: it was speed, and lightness, and rhythm, and in hockey he could skate, and shoot, and fight, and his body as no longer the awkward, overly hormonal thing it had been. It was a tool, a weapon.

He had lost that scholarship after all. It hadn’t been much of a decision, really, despite his father’s yelling, his mother’s tears, his uncle’s stoic silence. Through it all he had clasped tight to him the clean, icy whiteness of the rink, and had felt his feet on solid ground. He’d found his center, and nothing could push him from it.

The Ducks were in some ways a mystery to him, but in others they were ballast to his balance. Goodhearted Charlie, glib Averman, flinty Jesse, talented Adam, and each of the others, all like the Ducks they called themselves: ungainly misfits on land, but magnificent soaring creatures in their element, with a fierce joy in the game. With them, he had found his words.

Meeting Dean had felt like that: even in the first few moments of anger and frustration, he had felt deep within him that click, the same one he felt when the force of a puck shivered back up his stick and into his hands. He couldn’t name the path of his life in that moment, but he knew that it stretched out in front of him, and it included Dean.

Of course, he didn’t name it as such at the time; the teenager he was would have been embarrassed and angry to have been caught with such sappy thoughts. He only knew that being with Dean made him feel more of himself. When they were on the ice together, he didn’t have to scan his peripheral vision for Dean; he just knew where he would be. 

Tibbles had named them the Bash Brothers, and sure, it was a gimmicky marketing ploy, but it caught on. “Bash” never felt right - it implied randomness, wanton destruction, and as if there were no pattern or rhythm to the way he and Dean worked together. But brothers - yes, that scratched the surface.

Dean didn’t seem to have ever felt ungainly in his body, though he was ahead of his growth curve in much the way that Fulton was. Dean reveled in his size, in his strength, and grinned through his aggression. He loved the same things that Fulton loved, and he took it all in stride, as a matter of course that they loved these things, though they fell at the margins of what most other people loved.

Dean took him in stride, too, brought him into his life as if he fit perfectly - which he did. It wasn’t perfect - nothing ever was - but even through the cycles, even when Dean’s aggression tipped into fury, or Fulton’s silence tipped into sullenness, they still fit. Dean even charmed the Reeds with his knowledge of the Vikings’ passing game.

It was years later - years after that heady summer with Team USA, years after prep school, years after they had traveled the country together in Dean’s beat-up truck, that Fulton finally connected it all together: his slapshot, his fighting, skating, and finally, Dean. He’d found his true balance in all of them together.


End file.
